All That is Wales

by Professor M. Wynn Thomas

  But nationalism is not given an easy ride in A Man’s Estate. Mrs Elis’s version of that ideology is fanatical, chauvinistic and paranoid, a grotesquely pathetic echo of the brutally swaggering 1930s nationalism of Germany, Italy and Spain. Not so that of Humphreys. As developed through his exposure to wartime European conditions, his nationalism became internationalist in its implications. The transit camps helped him realise the universality of the ‘Welsh condition’ – of a small national culture’s struggle to retain a separate identity in the face of (linguistic, cultural, economic and political) powers ‘innocently’ intent on its obliteration. To members of a dominant, seemingly omnipotent, anglophone culture immeasurably reinforced, in the aftermath of victory, by the world dominance of the USA, such a struggle might seem to be the product of an outmoded and futile kind of petty, ‘provincial’ self-preoccupation. But the transit-camp experience had taught Humphreys that such an endangered condition was in fact the post-war European norm. And soon it would become the common fate of nations worldwide vulnerable to the culturally corrosive processes of ‘globalisation’ and its attendant anglicisation.

  Nor is this the only ‘international’ dimension of the novel’s concerns. In A Man’s Estate, Humphreys fashions a Welsh ‘family saga’ suitable for obliquely exploring a Europe-wide post-war crisis: how to deal with a ‘guilty’, humanly destructive past; but also how to apportion ‘guilt’ in such morally opaque circumstances. There is a striking resemblance between the terms in which Humphreys recalled the experience of serving in Italy in the immediate aftermath of war and those used in his novel by a Hannah bewildered by her family situation. Her problem is that:

  I must somehow, out of myself like an industrious silk-worm produce the thread that will bind the fragments together, or lead me back through the labyrinthine wood of incidents behind whose apparently solid trunks sinister outlines seem to move in the dark. (ME, 48)

  Speaking in interview about post-war Italy, Humphreys uses a similar image: ‘in the terrible situation Europe was in at the time, we were moving around like children in the forest to a great extent.’5

  Like the characters in some Ibsen play, the Elises are so obsessed with their terrible secrets they seem little more than pallid ghosts helplessly haunting the site of a violently vivid family crime. And in their gloomy moral paralysis, Humphreys seems to see, more locally, the state of a Welsh nation unable either to connect with its past in a way that would guarantee its future, or to break with it in ways that could offer a way forward. The other side of the coin represented by the monstrously deformed chapel ‘morality’ of the Elises is the vigorous self-interested resourcefulness of predatory ‘survivors’ like the scornfully anti-chapel Wally Francis and Winnie Cwm. Winnie’s daughter, Ada, is a much more complex character – sympathetic, attractive, even heroic perhaps, but with her tragic aspects. She pays the price for being both genetically and socially a product of both the world of the chapel and the world of her mother. Thus internally torn, she is only imperfectly able to turn her moral instincts into an opportunistic amorality. Willing herself to be manipulative, she struggles to get the better of the born, and therefore instinctive, manipulators (including Hannah’s half-brother Dick) by whom she is surrounded. To her irritation, she senses that compared with them she remains little more than a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

  The novel is thus coolly open-eyed in what is its nevertheless (guarded) advocacy of a committed concern with ‘belonging’ and with the difficulty of establishing an honest, appropriate, responsible, creative connection with the past. This becomes apparent if one considers its treatment of the alternative – an opting for a ‘rootless’, culturally amnesiac existence. Such is the life of Mrs Elis’s first husband, the ambitious young Liberal politician, Elis Felix Elis, loosely modelled on the morally and physically footloose career of the brilliant opportunist, Lloyd George. Greedily allured by London’s promise of office and power, Elis maintains the merest cynical token of a connection with his Welsh home and family, just sufficient to allow him to continue to be the darling of the chapels. Such a metropolitan path had, in Humphreys’s opinion, proved the headlong highway to national destruction for the Welsh and their country ever since the assimilationist Act of Union. During the first half of the twentieth century this well-trodden route had been enthusiastically followed not only by ambitious Liberal and Labour politicians but by the professional classes, including generations of Welsh teachers like Gwendoline Esmor (who has discreetly jettisoned that shameful brand of Welsh identity, the vulgar surname ‘Jones’). Miss Esmor and her secret lover Elis Felix Elis, MP are well matched in lamenting ‘the misfortune of being Welsh’ (ME, 215), in their desperate attempt to escape ‘that octopus country, that cannibal mother country’ (ME, 216). The MP’s middle name, ‘Felix’, nicely conveys his conscienceless and insouciant blitheness (felix being Latin for ‘happy’), while the repeating of ‘Elis’ perfectly captures his ruthless narcissism. Nurtured in the outlook of this pair, Felix’s son, Philip Elis views his journey to the family ‘estate’ as a descent into a pit of ‘Calvinistic sadists and hypocrites’ (ME, 231). Nor is he far wide of the mark.

  * * *

  Like Philip, when Emyr Humphreys returned to Wales he was brought into intimately close contact with Welsh Nonconformity. His wife, Elinor, was the daughter of a highly respected minister with the Annibynwyr (Welsh Independents), and, although Humphreys had been raised an Anglican – he had even considered taking holy orders as a teenager – on his marriage he was accepted into membership by his wife’s denomination. As her father grew older, Elinor assumed responsibility for his care, and this culminated with the Reverend Jones spending his declining years with the Humphreys family. This afforded his son-in-law an opportunity to acquaint himself thoroughly with the richness and complexity of Welsh Nonconformist culture. As a respected liberal, the Reverend Jones provided Humphreys with an excellent example of the effort made by the chapels after the First World War to remedy the damage that had been done by the publicly vociferous, jingoistic support for wartime recruitment of some of the more prominent conservative ministers. Partly in response to this, and to the perceived indifference of the denominations to the condition of the industrial working class, disillusionment and disaffection gripped chapel members during the post-war period, and mass defections followed. A generation of young, progressive, ministers, sympathetic to liberal theology, reacted by attempting to reconnect Nonconformity to the political radicalism that had characterised it during the later nineteenth century. While Humphreys greatly respected his father-inlaw as embodying the impressive qualities of this generation, in Idris Powell he examines not only the challenges faced by any young minister who commits himself totally to a humanly unexamined and untested gospel of love but also the challenge such a Christian idealist represents for the majority of us who settle for a much more pragmatic approach to life. Is Powell disastrously naive, or is he spiritually pure? Does he mistake eros for caritas? Is he a danger not only to himself but to others? What are we to make of a ‘holy fool’? Urgent questions of this kind have continued to trouble Humphreys throughout his long writing career, and the enigma represented by Powell has been represented time after time in his fiction by similarly puzzling, morally indecipherable characters.6

  A related issue explored through the character of Powell, and one that would again continue to haunt Humphreys for half a century thereafter, is whether a resolutely pacific approach to life is a sign of weakness, in a world so evidently governed by power and violence, or a sign of spiritual strength. This issue had presented itself in particularly anguished form in Humphreys’s own life when he had to choose whether or not to stand by his pacifist beliefs during the Second World War. And having opted for pacifism, he was faced with a related dilemma as a committed Welsh nationalist. Determinedly opposed to any kind of resort to force, he nevertheless had to admit that history seemed to offer no reassuring example anywhere of national liberty won without the sheddin
g of blood. These moral dilemmas are clearly focused in A Man’s Estate by the placing of Idris Powell in a society entirely at the mercy of the fierce struggle for power within the Elis family and between it and the community it dominates. Puzzled, moved, attracted and irritated in equal measure by the singular, stubbornly non-violent character of the young minister of Bethania, Ada intuits that his gospel of love represents a serious threat to her. Briefly infatuated by his sweet difference, she comes to regard him impatiently as an ineffectual naïf, a dangerous incubus likely to compromise her independence and liable to leech away her precious power of survival. She particularly resents, and fears, his attempt to treat her as an adored, redemptive figure at the centre of a new religion of romantic love. Ada’s reaction is, of course, significantly shaped by the feeling that she has twice previously fallen victim to her own dreamer’s weakness for ideals. Viewed in this light, Idris Powell is only the latest instance of this recurrent inner temptation she has previously failed to resist.

  * * *

  Although the action of A Man’s Estate covers more than thirty years, the novel was published in 1955 and can therefore usefully be viewed in the wider context of fiction’s response to British society during that decade. Long regarded as a pallid period in the history of a British novel exhausted by the exhilarating modernist experimentations of earlier decades and resorting to drearily familiar and superannuated realist conventions, the 1950s has recently undergone substantial revaluation and rebranding.7 The decade’s literary culture is now styled ‘late modernist’, or ‘intermodernist’, and emphasis has shifted to an appreciation of how the post-war generation of novelists can best be understood as engaged in a range of textual conversations with their celebrated modernist predecessors. For instance, as was noted by William Cooper, one of the significant writers of the decade, some of this new fiction was concerned to recognise the claims of its society upon it. Whereas the modernist ‘Experimental Novel’, Cooper later observed, ‘was about Man-Alone … we meant to write novels about Man-in-Society as well’.8

  This was a distinction with which Emyr Humphreys strongly identified. Just two years before the publication of A Man’s Estate he published a seminal essay in The Listener, one of the leading periodicals of the age. Entitled ‘A Protestant View of the Modern Novel’, it began by recognising that all 1950s novelists were working in ‘a post-Joyce era of English fiction’.9 Acknowledging Joyce’s genius, Humphreys proceeded to criticise the Irishman as a driven aesthete, intent on maintaining an ‘extraordinarily detached’ attitude towards life. Such an attitude, Humphreys argued, was no longer possible after 1945, because Joyce was a man of the ‘pre-atomic age’ who had also antedated the rise to power of the working class. The latter ‘have become a key factor in the technique of political power: monstrously large, frighteningly gullible, defenceless as a jelly fish – the raw material of the dictator’s or the advertiser’s art’ (CR, 70). The urgent function of the contemporary novel, the essay implies, is to educate this new mass society by providing it with a moral compass. Otherwise, the impressionable population will continue, as during the 1930s, to fall victim to unscrupulous demagogues and populist manipulators of public opinion. The danger of a socially empowered but morally directionless working population is indicated in A Man’s Estate by Humphreys’s treatment of the amiably exploitative garage-owner Wally Francis and his family and cronies. Raised in the chapel, Francis has long abandoned it, recognising that its moral, as well as its social, authority, has crumbled away not least through inner corruption. His alternative gospel, like that of all those who lie within the orbit of his petty dictatorship, is one of shrewd opportunism.

  In adopting his formalist attitude to human experience, Joyce was, Humphreys further argues in his essay, wholly at odds with the great tradition of the European novel as instanced by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others. For them, ‘human life was not [as it was for Joyce] the raw material of art; it was a strange sea in which humanity thrashed about like a powerful, bewildered whale, harpooned by death, and still consumed with a desire for immortality’ (CR, 70–1). This vision of mankind finds expression in the tragic action of A Man’s Estate. In any tragedy, Humphreys observes in his 1953 essay, ‘a lifetime leads to a meaningful crisis of disaster’ (CR, 71) – a comment that brings the Elises immediately to mind.

  Both Vavasor and Mary live out their lives to their tragic conclusion with a conscious sense of living under divine judgement. Theirs is a religious tragedy, as well as a personal and social one. And like many another writer and intellectual of the 1950s, Humphreys attributed the dangerous moral disorientation of his society to the decline of religion. Unlike his contemporaries, however, he refused to indulge in fantasies of ‘restoring the myth’, of defying science in order to reinstitute an ‘organic society’ of faith. ‘Religion’, he roundly insisted, ‘must embrace what is true in science’ (CR, 74). The dangers of divorcing the one from the other had been manifest in the terrible uses to which scientific knowledge had been put during the Second World War, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  And the issue of how to handle scientific understanding – in particular of how to deal with a human mind irreversibly refashioned in the image of science – is a very live one in A Man’s Estate. Could Vavasor have so arranged the scientifically undetectable murder of Felix Elis had he not possessed a chemist’s understanding of the exact consequences of ceasing medication and withholding water? Isn’t Hannah Elis’s wish to become a chemist an expression of her wish to evade responsibility for confronting the complex mess of human motives and actions? Doesn’t the coolly cynical Dr Pritchard afford an excellent example of a medical man’s untroubled adoption of a materialist and hedonistic philosophy on the questionable assumption that science has demonstrated there is no more to life than such pleasures and satisfactions as can be wrung from one’s mortal span? And isn’t Philip’s claiming of the scientist’s prerogative of ‘objectivity’ and ‘dispassionateness’ likewise clearly revealed, by the end of the novel, to be an abrogation of moral duty, a failure of imagination, conscience and nerve, and a refusal to face up to the bewildering claims upon him of the human condition? These instances of science’s failure to recognise key constitutive features of human existence are, of course, complemented in the novel by the failure of the chapel faithful to recognise science as religion’s challenging partner in human-kind’s endless pursuit of truth. As is noted in ‘A Protestant View of the Modern Novel’, ‘Religion cannot ignore science on the so-called spiritual plane any more than science can ignore religion on the material’ (CR, 74).

  Central to Humphreys’s important essay is his plea for the reinstatement of the ‘Protestant principle of personal responsibility’ (CR, 74). His is partly a reaction to the subordination of the individual to the mass will, evidenced so appallingly by both Fascist and Communist regimes. Humphreys’s concern was not, however, primarily with these vestiges of past ideology; rather, he shared the worry famously articulated by George Orwell in Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty Four (1949), that democratic states, too, were liable to turn authoritarian, even totalitarian, as they grew more dominantly systematised and centralist. Although in sympathy with that child of the 1950s, the Welfare State, Humphreys saw both in it and in the state rhetoric of a society fearful of the Communist threat, the seeds of a totalitarian democracy. It is worth bearing in mind that A Man’s Estate is roughly contemporary with the McCarthy witch-hunt of ‘Reds’ in a United States hysterically convinced it was at risk from Communist fifth-columnists.

  ‘The artist’, Humphreys observed in his 1953 essay,

  has shied away from the crude strength of the Protestant conscience – that constant, hoarse, dynamic whisper. But it possesses an exciting paradoxical combination of simplicity and complexity: an awareness of the great mystery, the infinite unconditional nature of God, and the egocentric solitude and sin of man in his trap of time. (CR, 74)

  The core subject of A Man’s Estate is the P
rotestant conscience, that stern guardian of a sense of personal responsibility. Many of the main characters are urgently aware of being finally answerable for their own lives and actions. The novel is a sustained study of the history of the Protestant conscience in a period of moral confusion and uncertainty. Those consequences are various, ranging from the case of Vavasor and his wife, who finally fall tragic victim to the moral conscience that has worn their minds to tatters and their bodies to the bone, to that of Wally Francis, in whose comfortably corpulent case moral self-scrutiny has metamorphosed into wily self-interest. Ada’s tragedy, of course, is that she is internally divided, trapped between the one principle and the other. As for Idris Powell, sexual passion and an attractive human compunction threaten to soften the iron backbone of his spiritually progressive principles.